Fascists take power in Austria. Could they do the same in Australia?

By Rick Kuhn

October 22, 2017 — 5.58pm

Heinz-Christian Strache, a neo-Nazi in his youth and now the besuited leader of Europe's most successful fascist party, is set to become Austria's deputy prime minister. The election on October 15 tipped out the coalition between the Socialists and the conservative People's Party. A new coalition between the racist neoliberals of the People's Party and Strache's Freedom Party is being negotiated.

With the Greens' failure to tally the 4 per cent needed to gain any seats, there is now no clearly anti-racist party in the Austrian parliament.

The previous government, under Socialist prime minister Christian Kern, presided over falling real wages and rising income and wealth inequality. In an attack on Muslim women, it legislated to ban the wearing of face coverings in public. That was an initiative of Sebastian Kurz, the conservative minister for foreign affairs and integration who became his party's leader in May, steered it hard right and is likely to be the next prime minister.

The conservatives won the largest share of votes last week: 31 per cent. Kurz embraced Islamophobic policies, long advocated by the Freedom Party, which gained 26 per cent, less than 1 per cent behind the Socialists.

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Once a Neo-Nazi, now deputy prime minister of Austria? Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache.Credit:Lisi Niesner

The Socialists decided to negotiate with the conservatives and the Freedom Party about a coalition. But a conservative-fascist deal is most likely. Its priorities will be attacks on unions, workers' rights and conditions, and on the welfare state, migrants and Muslims.

There is nothing like the Freedom Party in Australia. But the situation in Australia is not fundamentally different from those in France, Germany and Austria – prosperous countries where fascists have gained mass electoral support and had major successes this year.

Marine Le Pen made it in the two-candidate, second round of the French presidential contest. Her father, Jean-Marie, founded the party in 1972 with the backing of long-term fascists and collaborators with the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. They recognised that being too explicit about their violent hostility to democracy and unions was not electorally popular and set up the National Front as a more respectable-looking vehicle for their politics.

The Alternative for Germany, now dominated by its Third Reich-admiring right wing, became the first fascist party to enter the German parliament. Large anti-immigrant protests in Germany during 2013 and 2014 gave an impetus to the increasingly racist politics of the party, which was founded in just 2013 to oppose the European Union. The party's most prominent figure is Alexander Gauland, for many years a member of the "steel helmet" racist and nationalist current in Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union. Other prominent figures in the Alternative for Germany are associated with the German "new right" – i.e. fascists trying to achieve intellectual respectability.

The Freedom Party is the direct descendent of the Nazi Party in Austria. The Socialists promoted the registration of its forerunner in 1949, in an attempt to divert the votes of former Nazis who had, until recently, been disenfranchised, to the disadvantage of the People's Party. The Freedom Party's first leader was a former SS officer.

Between 1983 and 1987, the Socialists gave the Freedom Party – which, at the time, had a pro-free-market, liberal wing – extra credibility by making it their junior partner in a coalition government. After the Freedom Party shed its liberal elements, it was a junior partner in a coalition with the People's Party from 2000 to 2005.

Today, as political journalist Hans-Henning Scharsach has demonstrated, the Freedom Party is dominated by a tightly knit group who are members of racist academic fraternities, whose origins go back to the early 19th century but which assimilated more specifically Nazi ideas into their German chauvinist outlook during the Third Reich.

These three European fascist parties have used hostility to the consequences of neoliberal policies implemented by both conservative and social democratic parties, and racism, to mobilise support. They have been able to draw on substantial far-right networks.

In Australia, racist attitudes, sustained by governments and the media, run deep.

Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party entered the Australian Senate last year on an overwhelmingly racist platform, despite its unreliable, if not loopy, parliamentarians and its lack of a competent apparatus.

More significantly, the Liberal, National and Labor parties have all implemented racist policies, most obviously the relegation of refugees to offshore concentration camps and the Northern Territory intervention against Aborigines. The Liberal-National Coalition's cashless welfare card legislation, which targets Aborigines, was supported by Labor. Only the much smaller third mainstream party, the Greens, opposed these policies in parliament.

Australia's restrictive visas for overseas students, refugees and those allowed in to work but not settle have racist hues and make people on them vulnerable to substandard employment conditions and wages.

The Turnbull government has courted One Nation as it tries to get its legislation passed.

In Australia, racist attitudes, sustained by governments and the mass media, run deep.

At this stage, the extra ingredient of a substantial organisational infrastructure, present in France, Germany and Austria, for the growth of a mass fascist party is still missing here.

But by interviewing fascists (most recently Milo Yiannopoulos), reactionaries like commentator Andrew Bolt and shock jock Alan Jones but also Channel 9 and mass-media outlets help publicise their ideas. Triple J did the same in an interview with American neo-Nazi Eli Mosley in August.

Australian governments' increasingly steal-helmeted measures, in the name of public safety and law and order, also promote authoritarian sentiments shared with fascists. They justify the erosion of our civil liberties and increased police powers by invoking the alleged threat of terrorism. This is also used to build support for Australia's repressive and aggressive foreign policies, in alliance with the US, particularly in the Middle East, Afghanistan and South-East Asia. To the very limited extent that such a threat exists, it is a product of precisely those policies.

Law-and-order slogans bolster attacks on unions and employees' rights at work, while the government sheds crocodile tears when employers exploit their workers. Yet only strong unions can effectively safeguard wages and conditions.

Two sets of developments make the emergence of large fascist organisations, like those in Europe, less likely in Australia. The first is resistance to racism, homophobia and other forms of oppression, and resistance to curtailments of democracy and workers' living standards. This resistance can undercut the appeal of authoritarian and bigoted ideas and organisations.

Persistent counter-rallies against fascists' attempts to mobilise supporters and look tough have been crucial in preventing the emergence of substantial and coherent fascist groups. In Melbourne, where they are strongest, fascists' morale has been damaged by anti-racist protests whenever they announce they will take to the streets.

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On the evening of the Austrian elections, more than 500 people demonstrated noisily in Vienna against the participation of the Freedom Party in government. Australian fascists are still a long way from taking public office. We need to ensure they come no closer to power.

Rick Kuhn is an honorary associate professor in sociology at the Australian National University. rick.kuhn@anu.edu.au